1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to network management. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention relate to systems and methods for detecting aliases in a network of devices.
2. Description of Background Art
One of the purposes of a Network Management System (NMS) is to manage devices located on a network. The NMS needs to perform checks before initiating management of a device to verify if a device is an alias or not.
Various techniques are available in the art to detect aliases in a network. One of these techniques is based upon a duplication detection algorithm. According to the alias detection procedure implementing this algorithm, a user submits a device for management to the NMS. The NMS interacts with the device and collects data (e.g., such as IP address, Media Access Control (MAC) address, sysdesc, sysOID, atnetaddress, etc) for managing the device via Simple Network Management Protocal (SNMP) and stores collected data in its database. When a second device is submitted for management, the data for managing the second device is collected by the NMS and compared with the existing collected data of every other device that is already being managed by the NMS to determine whether the second device is an alias or not. The alias detection algorithm technique enables detection of an alias with considerable accuracy, but it requires a large amount of resources and takes a lot of time. In particular, when there are a few thousand devices to be managed, the time required for running the algorithm increases incrementally with the addition of a new device to the database.
Another technique known in the art, which provides better performance than the alias detection algorithm technique, uses an IP address to identify a device in the process of detecting aliases in the network. This technique requires lesser processing time, as the comparison is based only upon one parameter, i.e., the IP address. However, this technique is incapable of ensuring accuracy while detecting aliases. Also, this technique does not necessarily decrease the number of instances of inventory collection, which consumes most of the time. This technique may also use some other parameter, such as the MAC address, to identify if a device is an alias or not. However, the MAC address is also a variable identifier and may change with the inclusion of a new module in the device.